Sue Ellis
Serendipity Art | Kirklees YOT & Doncaster YOT Summer Arts Colleges
Sue Ellis is the director of Serendipity Art and has been involved in community arts and the development of arts projects using photography and film as an issue-based medium for over 15 years. In 2009, Serendipity Art delivered Summer Arts Colleges in partnership with Kirklees and Doncaster Youth Offending Teams (YOTs).
Sue was responsible for devising the programmes at both sites and Serendipity Art became the first organisation to deliver both the Bronze and Silver Arts Award for young people over the six-week Summer Arts College programme.
Here are Sue’s top tips:
1. Start from the end and work backwards
According to Sue, the key to a successful Summer Arts College is to ensure that staff and project managers carry out ‘meticulous planning and preparation’. When devising your project plan, it’s crucial to consider where you want to end up and, in the case of the Summer Arts Colleges, this goes a step further than simply ensuring that each young person achieves the Arts Award qualification.
"Whilst the Arts Award qualification is crucial for many young people of itself, it’s about going one step further and ensuring that there is a positive destination for each and every young person taking part in the programme. You could do more harm than good by running a great programme and then leaving your group of young people with nowhere to continue their development and build on their existing qualification once the programme ends."
Sue suggests building a strong relationship with local colleges and education providers and making crucial links in the weeks leading up to a Summer Arts College. Many FE colleges will agree conditional places before a programme begins in order to ensure that young people have places on a given course provided they achieve the Arts Award. If it’s difficult to secure the support of your local college, it is worth exploring opportunities with local E2E (entry to employment) providers or Arts Award Welcome Centres, where young people can be supported in order to extend their skills and achieve the Silver or Gold Arts Award. You may also like to consider running your own extension arts programmes attached to the YOT.
2. Get young people clued up!
Over the last few years there have been a number of valuable lessons learned around the importance of preparing young people for what is involved in attending a Summer Arts College. It is important to remember that, while the staff team may have been talking about and preparing the Summer Arts Colleges for a significant period of time, the project is totally new and perhaps slightly daunting to the young people involved.
Past experience has shown that, where young people are not involved in any aspect of planning the project, there is a significant reduction in engagement. Often this process of consulting with young people can take place through a simple visit to the young person, preferably with parents and/or carers present, to find out what their interests are and how they are feeling about the programme.
Sue’s approach to involving young people has been to design a bespoke student handbook. The handbook allows young people to see the programme as a connected series of arts activities with clear guidance around the Arts Award requirements and what a Level 1 qualification means for them.
"We put a few homework exercises in our student handbook and were very surprised to find that a few of our young people had actually completed the activities and read the handbook before the programme had begun! We actually found that young people would pre-empt sessions because they were clear about what was expected of them!"
Download the Kirklees Student Handbook >>
3. Mind your language
Positive use of language is something Sue feels very strongly about when working with young people. Throughout the programme, Sue aimed to instill a very upbeat but realistic approach to running and discussing the programme – and this is an approach that Sue feels helped to change perceptions for young people on the programme.
The Kirklees Student Handbook makes this method very clear to see: Sue was careful to ensure that every young person was welcomed onto the programme and despite the fact that the Summer Arts College was compulsory for young people on ISS or DTO, Sue chose to use language with the young people that allowed them to see the value of the work that they would be doing.
"It wasn’t a case of saying, “You have to be here because that’s what your order says”, it was a case of telling our young people, “Look, you have been commissioned by the Youth Justice Board to produce this fun and dynamic short film. You personally have been selected out of young people all over the country to take part in this.” Tackling recruitment like this really worked well for us because it meant that from the start we had that crucial ‘buy in’ from our group. They all looked at the project as a job and were much more aware of the skills they were taking away with them for future courses and jobs. By using our incentive scheme to give young people wage slips at the end of each week, it allowed young people to see they had what it takes to get a job or a qualification or progress onto other rewarding activities at the end of the project."
Sue on the Unitas Artists' Directory: www.unitas.uk.net/ArtistsDirectory/99345
Sue's website: www.serendipityart.co.uk